I admit I had some trouble with this post. Perhaps it’s because I am not an overly social person. I do know a lot about group dynamics and surprisingly I am told very often that I tend to have a stabilizing and harmonizing effect on groups but I am mostly busy enough with my single practice and my internet community. Although I do find other people’s practice really inspiring I don’t feel I am overly dependent on their feedback and input.

And then I suddenly came across this post How to Create a Group Mind and I was amazed to find so many thoughts which are very familiar to me and which I find more than suitable and appropriate to work with regarding other people’s practice and UPGs.

Since I am studying a lot of medical and anatomical research I often find great metaphors in this field. A relatively new field in medicine is cell communication. Before it was largely assumed that the body has a centralized control system which is the brain and the spinal cord. While the brain is said to take care of mostly conscious and subconscious functions the spinal cord is in charge of the automatic function of the body. But this theory spares a rather important communication system of the body: The inter-cell communication. Every single cell exchanges information with its neighbor cell and that constantly.

If you have ever watched a bird or fish swarm you might have been amazed by their synchronic movement. Each of these animals owns perceptive functions which allow an amazingly quick adjustment to the neighbors reactions which extends in an incredible quick pace to a whole huge swarm and makes them move like a huge unified being. Our cells function the same way and the central nervous system has nothing but regulating effects on this. And I strongly believe – based on my knowledge in both neurology and psychology – that the human mind is capable to form a similar dynamic.

We are concentrating so much on our aware processes, possibly driven by an increase of virtual communication, that we might have forgotten how to work with intuition. And Intuition is essential for a group awareness. Intuition is not some mysterious, magical process of our awareness in fact it is just a more subconscious, possibly lesser structured, but much quicker way of connecting stored information in our brain, highly driven by emotion, memory and cognitive behavior. This part of our awareness does not distinguish between right or wrong – because that is the job of our rational thinking – it only knows “I can relate” or “I can’t relate”. I would like to suggest to give this mechanism more value when it comes to dealing with UPG and spiritual practice.

Like in a living organism some cells do a completely different jobs than others. A liver cell is in charge of totally different functions than a heart cell and is likely to receive totally different information even if it is from the same originator (eg. the brain). So it would make no sense at all for a liver cell to classify heart specific info as wrong only because the liver cell is not capabole of processing this input.

I think it is very much the same with my fellow kemetics. If they share there UPGs with me, eg. when a deity talks to them, I might relate if we are in a similar function in the “community organism” but I might just as well find their information totally confusing or hardly understandable. While my intuition feels it cannot relate my rational thinking might interpreate that as “wrong” but if we talk on the level of UPG “wrong” is an estimation that does not really apply well. The only thing I would consider important for my estimation is that what they do actually shows some functionality and benefits the community as a whole. And this is among others a question of trust.

I don’t have to understand everything to be able to trust a person. If I am able to trust my fellow kemetics, both interpersonally but also in their devotion to the gods this is basically all I need to know to be able to trust their practice. If I see they take things serious, the do what the can, they learn and educate themselves, they follow their path and they are decent people with a high interest in contributing to the same tradition I follow I have no reason to question their practice only because it may be different from mine. In fact then I can appreciate the variety which is created by many different and great minds and enjoy it and let it inspire me. And it opens up a great amount of freedom to myself to vary my practise, too.